Tag: David Lodge

‘No one over the age of 40 – no one at any rate old enough to have experienced a literary world made up entirely of books, newspapers and reference libraries – can roam the world of the blogosphere and the online symposium without thinking that there is too much of everything – too many books, too much criticism of them, too many reviews, too many opinions, too many reading groups, too many book clubs, so many literary prizes that any vaguely competent novel comes garlanded with two or three endorsements from the judging committees, that we are drowning in a sea of data where an instant reaction is always liable to crowd out mature reflection, where anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s and the fact that the distinguished man of letters in the Wall Street Journal thinks McCarthy’s The Road is a work of genius is of no interest at all to the Amazon reviewer who awards a single star for a “lack of bite”.’

Well, there is definitely too much of that sentence, but you can see what he’s getting at.

It comes towards the end of D J Taylor’s The Prose Factory, which covers the history of English literary affairs and business from 1918 through to roughly present day.

It is full of ideas about writing, the business of writing, and by that I mean both the often neglected financial side, and also what writers were really concerned with, as opposed to what they said they were concerned with.

There is a great section on the rise of what was known as “the middle article” – light essays on literature or culture more generally in newspapers from roughly the 1920s onwards.

Such articles were still common in British newspapers when I became a junkie in the mid-1980s – or at least the broadsheets such as the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Observer and the Sunday Times.

The ‘middle article’ became the vehicle for maintaining liberal values just as, in the political sphere, the liberal tradition became threatened. Essayists as diverse as GK Chesterton or AG Gardner or JB Priestley kept this tradition going – a tradition which included the attitudes of universality tolerance and diversity of subject matter.

One essayist is described by Taylor, delightfully, as reviewing James Joyce’s Ulysses from ‘the angle of one who suspects that Ulysses has merit but can’t quite see it himself’.

This got me thinking about the blogosphere because… Well of course it did. Back when blogs became a thing, about a dozen years or so ago, I likened them to the old 18th and 19th-century pamphleteers: partisan, often puerile, and occasionally very personal.

There has, in the past few years, developed a sort of second wave of blogs in New Zealand (and no doubt elsewhere) which is less concerned with politics and more with wider issues.

There is still a highly political element, but it manages – a fair amount of the time, anyway – to avoid the juvenile and extremely boring ‘Ya Boo Lefties! ‘Ya Boo Righties!’ face pulling behaviour which became synonymous with blogging for a long time.

I think this “middle article” style seems not a bad description of the second wave.

Taylor is good – very good in fact, if very acerbic – about the sheer snobbery of many writers, with those espousing radical politics being the most snobbish of the lot.

The chapter on the 1930s – “The Pink Decade” points out that champions of working class amongst the intelligentsia seldom admitted actual members of the working class to their salons and that when they tried things seldom turned out well. There is a heartbreaking anecdote of Sid Chaplin, one of the few working-class writers,who was published being invited to George Orwell’s house and making it as far as the doorway before fleeing in terror.

He also has the occasional go at the more anti-intellectual tradition of English letters, but points out that even this, once upon a time, could draw on a background of shared cultural and intellectual heritage.

The mid-20th Century battleground between ‘modernists and traditionalists, of highbrows and lowbrows, of middle-class reactionaries, as Orwell once put it, thanking God they were not born brainy…’ was real enough, but, as he says, even conservative critics of T S Elliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ could pick up the classical allusions. That isn’t so now.

There is the ongoing problem of funding literature: ‘put an entity charged with expanding public take-up of literature in the hands of a bureaucrat, and the literature itself is all too easily lost sight of. Put it in the hands of other writers and the first casualty is likely to be a grasp of practical reality.’

There is, perhaps naturally, quite a bit on two writers who have written a lot about writers: the two friends who were often mistaken for each other, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge.

Bradbury I’ve only recently started reading although I’ve certainly been aware of him for some years – Taylor heralds as a kind of chronicler of the strange death, not so much of Liberal England as of the less definable, and much more important, set of broad liberal ideas and attitudes. Bradbury is, he says,

Bradbury is, he says

‘an elegist for an ethical code in severe danger of being swamped, a dazzling intellectual high wire act or even – to lower the bar a bit – is top-notch slapstick comedian in the Kingsley Amis mould. His real achievement, you suspect, rests on his ability to show just how formidable a force the old-style liberal humanists can be – even here in a wind and ground down world, somewhere in that endlessly contested space between the end of the Cartesian project and the beginning of the World Wide Web.’

Bradbury’s compatriot and friend David Lodge has a slightly different approach and has a lovely line about how Lodge

‘clearly isn’t averse to dressing up in the glad rags of literary theory, but on this, and other, evidence he wouldn’t want to wear it next to his skin.’

And that brings us to the issue of literary theory which haunted the study of English when I was at university in the late 80s and which was one of the main reasons I steered clear of an English major. I figured if I was going to do political theory I would rather have the real thing.

And here we go full circle, back to the snobbery of the Bloomsbury-ites and their fellow modernists. There is a thorough and by no means one-sided discussion of critic John Carey and his attack on modernism, post-modernism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and literary theory generally, and Taylor does conclude that all too often 20th century literature has acted for minorities and elites to the exclusion of a large potential of readers of ordinary intelligent people who have developed, over the years, thoroughly understandable dislike of ‘culture’ and the ‘cultured’.

‘The “literary novel” … would sell far more copies and attract far more attention beyond newspaper books pages if it didn’t habitually come served with a light sauce of snootiness – if in fact, it didn’t refer to itself as a literary novel in the first place.’

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role — that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength — this role is about played out.

So spoke former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson in the early 1960s. Acheson was of course discussing foreign policy, and the comments came at the time the British government was edging towards joining what was then called the European Economic Community and which we now know as a European Union.

And of course we also now though British voters opted to leave Europe last month, even if we – and they – still don’t quite know what that vote means.

Acheson almost definitely did not have in mind the kind of role Dominic Sambrook outlines in The Great British Dream Factory.

That role is as a kind of middlebrow entertainer to the world. Books, true, play a sizeable part in this role.

Sandbrook is though more enamoured of film, television, and music – a chapter on the country house is more interested in the film and television examples than the literary ones.

Brideshead Revisited certainly features, but Sandbrook is more interested in the 1981 television series than the original Evelyn Waugh novel (not one of Waugh’s best efforts, in my view, but still). While P G Wodehouse and Agatha Christie get a look in, it is the global phenomenon of Downton Abbeywhich really generates Sandbrook’s enthusiasm.

Spies – he seemed rather taken with James Bond – and science fiction such as The Prisoner and Doctor Who are also star products of his Dream Factory production line.

While I’m sympathetic to Sandbrook’s rejection of some of the overrated cultural icons it covers, he tries a little too hard and too self-consciously to be a kind of middlebrow, plain-man iconoclast (he rates Elton John over David Bowie, to take one example).

His book lacks Taylor’s elegance and above all Taylor’s penetrating wit. While Taylor’s study – admittedly with a slightly narrower focus – is surefootedly deft, deep, and occasionally droll, there is a sense of clumsiness, over striving for effect, in Sandbrook’s work.

‘We are often told that the next generation of literati won’t have private libraries: everything will be on the computer. It’s a rational solution, but that’s probably what’s wrong with it. Being book crazy is an aspect of love and therefore scarcely rational at all.’.

My first introduction to Clive James, apart from a snippy reference to a review at the start of one of Spike Milligan’s war memoirs*, was his television shows in the 1980s. Have to confess I wasn’t a fan. The shows seemed a mix of cheap laughs and often a slightly sleazy air. Not my cup of tea.

They was also his poem on the Charles and Diana wedding, which quite embarrassing.

Sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s I came across a piece of his about poet Philip Larkin, who I just had discovered.

It was like finding that Krusty the Clown was, in real life, Montaigne**. It was perceptive, it showed things I hadn’t noticed, it was witty, humane,intelligent.

Dammit , it was good.

James is now dying of leukemia, and it is this death sentence which hangs over much of his latest works – it is there, of course, in the title, with its dark pun.

And he is not going quietly: commendably though, rather than rage he is writing, writing, against the dying of the light.

Some people parade their learning. In the past James has tended not so much as parade his knowledge: he’s been more inclined to take his on night manouvres with the Panzerdivision. If he could draw a reference to a sesquipedalian continental writer, or some obscure Russian, all while peeling the spuds, it seemed he would do so at the drop of a quotation mark.

Life, and the wisdom which comes with not only experience but the ability to learn from experience, has seen him tone this down.

A bit. The learning is still very much present: one of the favourite recent additions to my bookshelves is his magisterial Cultural Amnesia, which is full of obscure byways and is one of those books of learning which are a joy to dip into from time to time.

But he has learnednot to overdo it.

“The critic should write to say, not ‘look how much I’ve read,’ but ‘look at this, it’s wonderful'” he comments towards the end of Latest Readings. Theres a rueful, if implicit, acknowledgement of follies of younger years there.

The critic should also, of course, send you off to check out his subjects. On the strength of reading James – not only here, but more recent pieces in the Guardian – I’ve had another bash at Conrad. Apart from “doing” Heart of Darkness at Uni, I have read little of his work. I picked up ‘Nostromo’ at a second hand store in Auckland, back in Uni days in the late ’80s but struggled with it and it was a book which was, amongst others, wiped out in The Great Sandringham Road Leaking Roof Catastrophe of 1992.

But when James writes, as he does here, that he first read it full of admiration for both Conrad and himself: Conrad for his moral scope and himself for his endurance in actually managing to read the thing, it struck a chord with me.

“Perhaps to induce self-esteem in the reader had been one of the author’s aims. There are those who believe that Wagner made Siegfried so wearisome because he wanted the audience to admire themselves.”

He has more time for Conrad now – and on James’ recommendation, I’m currently about half way through Under Western Eyes. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, it reminds me of some of William Golding’s later writing. It’s hard work, but its also difficult not to persevere. There is something about it which draws the reader on – well, this reader, anyway.

James quotes Samuel Johnson, approvingly, on the way language changes and notes the man famous, amongst other things, for writing a dictionary wrote as if language is an ever-changing thing. Johnson was not trying to resist this, but make sure that as it changed it did not become corrupted.

“That our languages and perpetual danger of corruption cannot be denied; but what prevention can be found? The present manners of the nation would deride authority and therefore nothing is left but that every writer should criticise himself.”

All he needed to add was that unless you can criticise yourself you’re not a writer, James adds.

James remains impressed with Anthony Powell: and, sorry, but I’ve never managed to get beyond a few dozen pages with A Dance To the Music Of Time, despite having several bashes at it. But I loved James’ characterisation of Powell’s writing which, he says, ‘sometimes piled on the subtlety to the point of flirting with the evanescent’.
This is, I think, the crucial attributes of a great critic: the ability to write enjoyably about something the reader may not like and may even have no interest in. (In the New Zealand context, Diana Wichtel – like James, a television critic – in the Listener falls into this category. I enjoy reading her columns about tv programmes I have never watched and have no intention of doing so).

And on Larkin – who features, as he so often does, in James’ work, – he defends the poet against the backlash which followed the Andrew Motion biography in 1993 and the revelations Larkin was, in his private life, something of a porn-loving creep.

As James writes now,

‘The turmoil of his psyche is the least interesting thing about him. His true profundity is right there on the surface, and the beauty of his line. Every ugly moment of his interior battles was in service to that beauty.’

He is right about the first claim. I am not so sure about that last sentence though. Sometimes the point of Larkin is where the ugly moments obtruded on the beauty, especially in some of the ‘High Windows’ collection, not to mention some of the works which were left unpublished until after Larkin’s death.

Mention of Larkin brings me to Robert Dessaix’s memoir, What Days Are For.

I’ve never heard of Dessaix, but the title is the first line in a Larkin poem and when I saw it on the pile at good ol’ Unity Books, I swooped.

The poem, in full, is here:

What are days for?Days are where we live.They come, they wake usTime and time over.They are to be happy in:Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that questionBrings the priest and the doctorIn their long coatsRunning over the fields.

It has been one of my favourite poems since coming across it sometime in my 20s. It’s message seems to me to be you have to live the life you have got: ‘days’ does not refer to a 24 hour period but a much more broad thing, they are simply ‘where we live’.

The last four lines are marvellous. There is something risible about the image of the priest and the doctor. The ‘doctor’ here, I am sure, is not a medical person but an academic, an ideologue.

And like the priest, the ideologue comes running over the fields, all flapping coat and wagging finger, telling us how to solve the question of life with their pat answers.

Dessaix – like James, an intellectual Australian – wrote the book while recovering from a medical mishap and pondering the Meaning Of It All.

His life appears somewhat abstract: he has a (male) partner and their life together, as depicted in the memoir, appears to be very much of the mind. It is in some ways enviable but in other ways there seems something curiously airless and un-grounded about it all.

Which is not to say his book is not a thought provoking and enjoyable read.

He ponders a visit to the sub-continent, wonders about the attractions of India and in particular its religions have for well heeled Westerners.

He writes of “middle-aged women with Alice in Wonderland hair from Melbourne and Milwaukee…in search of the spiritual moment that will last a lifetime (to misquote Casanova)” – a few men and crushed linen pants and no socks, Suede and scarves, but mostly woman.

‘What is the attraction of Indian religions for Westerners? What is it the cast the spell? It’s got something to do with the way they can claim not to be religious as such I suspect. “Oh it’s not a religion it’s a way of life “– how many times have I heard that?’

He also points out acidly the gods of the region are a long way from the Judao-Christian God – at least, a long way from the watered down version of God taught in many churches.

He doubts anyone would speak of ‘love’ in a Kali Temple in the way the term would be used in a Christian church. Gods and the Indian imagination are much more ferocious, he writes.

There is not the message that all will be well (Dessaix puts this in italics) which is familiar to the sort of Protestant churches he recalls from his youth.

One of his companions who has a Tamil background suggest that this sort of thing and what he calls lovingkindness (again the italics are his) is a bit middle-class and sentimental when applied to any sort of God. Lovingkindness along with disinterested courtesy and altruism, is, he argues a western luxury, born of economic security.

The Greek gods ‘had no time for mercy or compassion either: Zeus and its progeny are as stony heart as earthquakes and thunderstorms.’

But then so is the God of much of the old and new testaments. While Dessaix quotes almost rapturously Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians

‘though I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity I am become sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing’.

he also points out the stony judgementalism of much of the Bible – and not just the Old Testament, either.

‘On Judgement Day, if I’m not mistaken, on his right hand will stand those who gave them something to eat and drink when he was hungry and thirsty, gave them close to put on when he was naked, and visited him when he was sick and imprisoned… On his left however will stand those who gave you nothing to eat or drink, did not close, and did not visit him when he was sick and imprisoned. They will be cast into everlasting fire. This now seems a bit over the top. He was about to be betrayed and killed when he made that threat, and he knew it, so he was understandably a little overwrought, but all the same the punishment does not seem to fit the crime.’

He muses this diatribe is not about just being nice to each other anymore than Hinduism is, although it largely was when he was growing up. It is about seeing Truth face-to-face, and the need to be empathetic in doing so.

‘… Go out of the way to put yourself into the shoes of others, unlock your heart as you look into their ears, and do whatever you can to ease their wretchedness. And in blessing you will be blessed.’

There is a whiff of Hindu Darshan, in this, he notes.

There are other – often highly tangental but nevertheless enjoyable – asides.

Dessaix defines a masterpiece as a book you’ve never quite finished reading, which strikes me as being uncomfortably, if amusingly, accurate.

He suggests romantic love as being ‘often barely sexual at all when it first strikes, except very late at night and very early in the morning’ which doesn’t strike me as being particularly accurate at all, but then, we all have our own different experiences in this area.

He visits Damascus in Syria, sits at a cafe, sipping a banana milkshake in the street where a blinded St Paul is reputed to have been taken to refuge by his companions.

He meets an English tourist who is pondering doing the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage. He cheerfully says he’s not a believer and hasn’t been since nine has done it before wants to again because he likes to feel linked into something.

That striving for some sort of ‘linking into something’ seems, in fact, to be the book’s main undercurrent.

And he reads David Lodge’s novel Deaf Sentence , in which the narrator quotes Larkin’s Days.

He doesn’t find the poem disheartening or depressing even though he is aware Larkin’s poems tend to be on the dolorous side. The scurrying priests at the end he says look like clowns, and could even be a bit on the macabre side – what is he seeing here? Death in a gown?

‘That would be more in keeping with Larkin I suppose. We live in days not in Hobart or Hull or in this year all that year or even lifetimes or eras let alone “in the moment” or even in God’s timeless gaze. We live in” our own succession of days”. Learn to value that’.

Again, the italics are his.

There is much to value in both these books.

* James had reviewed, otherwise favourably, a previous volume and commented the work was not historically accurate and Milligan took grave offence. I will return to the Milligan books another time: for now it is worth noting Milligan did not hold a grudge, as his subsequently published letters shows.

Freelance Wellington Journalist. Specialises in economics, tax, policy generally, and the ups and downs of politics. Dad, husband: farm boy by origin, Wellingtonian by adoption. This is a hobby blog. I usually post something on the weekend, but not *every* weekend.